The morning sun was hitting the linoleum in a way that made the scratches look like a map of somewhere I never wanted to visit. I was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee that had gone lukewarm twenty minutes ago. My granddaughter, Kayla, was standing behind me, leaning over my shoulder with her phone in her hand.

“It is easy, Grandma,” she said, her voice bright and full of that annoying patience young people have. “Just tap the little magnifying glass. Type in a name. You will see photos of the babies in no time.”

I didn’t really want to be on the internet. I liked my life quiet and offline. But I wanted to see the great-grandbabies, and those little ones were growing up in Florida while I stayed here in Alabama. So I nodded and reached for the tablet she had brought over.

“Okay,” I said. “I am trying.”

I typed in the name of a girl I used to work with back at the mill in 1994. I hadn’t thought about her in years. I just wanted to see if she was still around. I hit search, and the screen blinked white for a second.

Then, the results popped up. It wasn’t the woman I was looking for. It was a suggested profile, something the machine thought I might know. A photo slid up the screen like a ghost coming out of the floorboards.

It was Roscoe. My Roscoe. He was standing in a backyard I had never seen in my life, holding a paper plate with a slice of cake on it. He was wearing that blue work shirt he keeps in the truck, the one he tells me he wears when he has to climb under the engine.

A woman was standing right next to him. She had her arm looped through his, and she was leaning into his shoulder like she had been doing it every single day for a lifetime. Her head was tilted, and she was smiling at the camera with a look that made my stomach turn over.

“Grandma, are you okay?” Kayla asked.

I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. The room felt like it was shrinking. I kept staring at the photo. I looked at the background. There were balloons tied to a fence. It looked like a birthday party for a child.

My thumb, which felt heavy and numb, moved on its own. I tapped the woman’s face. The screen changed. I was on her page now.

It was all there. I scrolled down, and it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. There were pictures of Christmases in that same backyard. There were photos of a boy and a girl, maybe seven and five years old. They had Roscoe’s hair. They had his exact, crooked grin.

I felt like I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. My heart wasn’t shattering. It was just stopping. It was tired.